Six teams in six months: Deakin unveils 'Venetian Blind' at Biennale
Media release
A group of Deakin University creative arts students and researchers are about to undertake an extraordinary six-month international public art project in conjunction with the 58th Venice Biennale.
Working in six teams, one for each month of the Biennale, 23 researchers and PhD candidates will be asked to deliver a series of creative responses to a place-based provocation as part of the European Cultural Centre exhibition, Personal Structures.
Working across assorted locations all over Venice, the artists will document their work in the famous Palazzo Bembo exhibition space.
The exhibition, titled Venetian Blind, is being curated by Professor David Cross and Dr Cameron Bishop, from Deakin's School of Communication and Creative Arts, and run by the University’s research initiative, the Public Art Commission.
The work is one of Deakin's largest international public art exhibitions and the Commission’s biggest undertaking in Europe, following large-scale ensemble public art projects in New Zealand and Tasmania.
Commission Co-Director, Professor Cross said the title of the exhibition was a word play on the famous Venetian architectural invention but, in this instance, Venetian Blind referred to artists entering a project without any knowledge of their artistic brief.
"The six provocations will involve various locations, stories and histories and the teams can respond to them through visual art or performance," Professor Cross said.
"As each team develops a public project and subsequently installs documentation of their work in the Palazzo Bembo, the exhibition will grow to depict specific stories, people and places throughout the city, framed through larger narratives of class, sexuality, colonialism, race, globalisation and political structures."
Dr Bishop said the project will establish a critical accord between the great narratives of Venice and its little-known parts.
"Venice has a million stories to tell; it has an extraordinary history as a maritime centre, as a powerhouse of 16th to 18th century commerce, and floating city with its own Gothic and Rococo aesthetic," Dr Bishop said.
"The artists have an abundance of riches to respond to, and we are interested in that unmediated experience of the city," he said.
Locations from the Lido through San Michele, Murano and Sant Erasmo will feature alongside more traditional Biennale locations, allowing artists to explore hidden aspects of the city and their resonance with the human condition.
The 58th Venice Biennale, titled May You Live in Interesting Times, runs from Saturday 11 May to Sunday 24 November 2019.
